New display technologies such as electronic paper are making it possible to integrate an electronic display into a wide variety of objects that have not traditionally contained a display, allowing the appearance of the object and the corresponding messaging to be changed dynamically. Changes in appearance and messaging of the displays can be managed through a computerized mechanism. Although such a pairing is not common today, it is possible to use a content management system (CMS) originally designed to control dynamic signs to allow for some level of automated content scheduling on the aforementioned integrated displays, based on unique identification numbers associated with each display, coupled with programmatic rules and playlists. However, such scheduling is a relatively manual process involving many tasks that must be performed by a human operator, and current CMS's are not designed for managing large-scale deployments of integrated displays, especially if unique playlists are to be applied to tens of thousands of displays or more. Further, these prior art CMS's are generally not concerned with automatically managing content throughout the lifecycle of an object.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that allows objects to display information that is tailored for their current circumstances, allows the information to be updated without undue oversight by human operators, and automates the changing of information based on the current circumstances even when avenues of communication to a centralized control and distribution system are unavailable.